It was a year rich in rejections, making it not unlike every year since I started writing. But rejections, because they’re so often impersonal, are also unmemorable, particularly the ones that never get written (which seem to increase – if something that doesn’t exist can be said to grow in number – every year).
More indelible were my debuts in two publications: the Los Angeles Review of Books and the MLB All-Star Game Official Program. (There was another, but because of the editing it shall go unmentioned.) I spoke about travel writing in the Cheever Room at the Kenyon Review in Gambier, Ohio, and about the joys of travel at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, Florida. On the Ohio trip I also gave talks at the University of Akron and the Polish-American Cultural Center in Cleveland, and did book readings in Mt. Vernon and Cleveland Heights (the last on a snowy night in April). I taught a course in travel writing for the Miami Book Fair, after which one of my students got her story published. (No rejections for her.) My big trip of the year was to Portugal, a two-week vacation that nevertheless produced a story – about the complicated feelings of a travel writer on returning to a beloved place now crowded with tourists – that has not yet found a home (see first paragraph). And I finished my memoir about becoming a travel writer.
